Tatiana looked about her. Five dead soldiers lay in the vicinity. She stuck her hand into the small pocket of one of their rucksacks and pulled out a lighter. Alexander had always kept his lighter in the small pocket of his rucksack, too. She used to fetch it to light his cigarettes for him. Flicking the lighter on, she held the small flame to the first glow plug for a few seconds. Then to the second one. Then to the third. By the time she got through all six, the first one was as cold as before she had started. Tatiana had had quite enough. Gritting her teeth and groaning, she broke a low branch off a birch and tried to light it. The branch was too wet from the snow. It wouldn’t light.

She looked around in frantic desperation. She knew exactly what she was searching for. She found it behind the truck in a small case on the body of one of the Finns. He was wearing a flamethrower. Tatiana yanked the flamethrower off the dead Finn, her jaw set and her face dark, and strapped it to her back like Alexander’s rucksack. Holding the propellant hose firmly in her left hand, she pulled out the ignition plug in the tank, flicked the lighter on, and pressed it to the ignition.

Half a second passed and all was still, and then a white nitrate flame burst out of the hose, the recoil nearly knocking Tatiana backward onto the snow. Nearly. She remained standing.

She walked up to the open hood of the truck and pointed the flame over the engine for a few moments. Then a few more moments. She could have stood there for thirty seconds, she couldn’t tell. Finally with her right hand she popped the ignition lever down, and the handheld fire shut off. Flinging the flamethrower off her back, Tatiana climbed into the truck, turned the key, and the engine creaked once and revved into life. She started the truck in neutral, depressed the clutch, put the transmission into first gear, and stepped on the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. She drove slowly across the defense line to pick up Dr. Sayers.

To get Sayers inside the Finnish truck required more out of her than she had.

But not much more.

After she got him in, Tatiana’s eyes caught the Red Cross flag on Sayers’s truck.

She found Dimitri’s army knife in his boot. Walking over to the truck, Tatiana reached up and carefully cut out the Red Cross badge. How she was going to attach it to the tarpaulin on the Finnish truck, she had no idea. She heard Dr. Sayers moan in the back and then remembered the first aid kit. With mindless determination she got the kit, along with a plasma bottle. Cutting away the doctor’s coat and shirt, she attached the plasma bottle to his vein, and while the plasma was draining, she looked over his inflamed wound, which was red around the entry hole and unclean. The doctor was hot and delirious. She cleaned the wound with some diluted iodine and covered it with gauze. Then with grim satisfaction she poured iodine onto her cheek and sat pressing a bandage to her face for a few minutes. It felt as if the glass were still inside her skin. She wished she had some undiluted iodine and wondered if the cut would need stitches. She thought it would.

Stitches.

Tatiana remembered the suture needle in the first aid kit.

Her eyes clearing, Tatiana took the suture needle and suture thread, jumped down, and, standing on tiptoe, carefully sewed the large Red Cross symbol into the brown canvas of the Finnish truck. The thin thread broke several times. It didn’t matter. It just had to hold until Helsinki.

After she was done, Tatiana got behind the wheel, turned to the back, said into the small window, “Ready?” to Dr. Sayers, and then drove the truck out of the Soviet Union, leaving Dimitri dead on the ground.



Tatiana drove down the marshy wooded path, carefully and uncertainly, with both hands clutching the big wheel and her feet barely reaching the three pedals. Finding the road that stretched along the Gulf of Finland from Lisiy Nos to Vyborg was easy. There was only one road. All she had to do was head west. And west she could find by the location of the gloomy, barely interested March sun.

In Vyborg she showed her Red Cross credentials to a sentry and asked for fuel and directions to Helsinki. She thought he asked her about her face, pointing to it, but since she didn’t speak Finnish, she didn’t answer and drove on, this time on a wide paved road, stopping at eight sentry points to show her documents and the wounded doctor in the back. She drove for four hours until she reached Helsinki, Finland, in late afternoon.

The first thing she saw was the lit-up Church of St. Nicholas, up on a hill overlooking the harbor. She stopped to ask directions to “Helsingin Yliopistollinen Keskussairaala,” the Helsinki University Hospital. She knew how to say it in Finnish, she just couldn’t understand the directions in Finnish. After she’d made five stops for directions, finally someone spoke enough English to tell her the hospital was behind the lit-up church. She could find that.

Dr. Sayers was well known and loved at the hospital where he had worked since the war of 1940. The nurses brought a stretcher for him and asked Tatiana all sorts of questions she did not understand: most of them in English, some in Finnish, none in Russian.

At the hospital she met another American Red Cross doctor, Sam Leavitt, who took one look at the gash in her face and said she needed stitches. He offered her a local anesthetic. Tatiana refused. “Suture away, Doctor,” she said.

“You’ll need about ten stitches,” the doctor said.

“Only ten?”

He stitched her cheek as she sat mutely and motionlessly on a hospital bed. Afterward he offered her some antibiotic, some painkiller, and some food. She took the antibiotic. She did not eat the food, showing Leavitt her swollen and bloody tongue. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Tomorrow it will be better. Tomorrow I will eat.”

The nurses brought her not only a new, clean, oversize uniform that hid her stomach but also warm stockings and a flannel undershirt, and they even offered to launder her old, soiled clothes. Tatiana gave them the uniform and her woolen coat but kept her Red Cross armband.

Later Tatiana lay on the floor by Dr. Sayers’s bed. The night nurse finally came in and asked her to go and sleep in another room, lifting her and leading her out. Tatiana allowed herself to be led out, but as soon as the nurse went down the hall to her station, Tatiana returned to Dr. Sayers.

In the morning he was worse and she was better. She got her old uniform back, starched and white, and managed to eat a bit of food. She remained all day with Dr. Sayers, staring out the window to the patch of the iced-over Gulf of Finland she could see past the stone buildings and the bare trees. Dr. Leavitt came in the late afternoon to check on her face and to ask her if she wanted to go and lie down. She refused. “Why are you sitting here? Why don’t you go get some rest yourself?”

Turning her head to Matthew Sayers, Tatiana didn’t reply, thinking, because that’s what I do — then, now. I sit by the dying.

At night Sayers was worse still. He had a high fever of nearly 42°C, and was parched and sweaty. The antibiotics weren’t helping him. Tatiana didn’t understand what was happening to him. All she wanted was for him to regain consciousness. She fell asleep in the chair next to his bed, her head near him.

In the middle of the night she woke up, feeling suddenly that Dr. Sayers wasn’t going to make it. His breathing — it was too familiar to her by now, the last gasping rattles of a dying man. Tatiana took his hand and held it. She placed her hand on his head, and with her broken tongue whispered to him in Russian, in English, about America and about all the things he would see when he got better. He opened his eyes and said in a weak voice that he was cold. She went and got him another blanket. He squeezed her hand. “I’m so sorry, Tania,” he whispered, rapidly breathing through his mouth.

“No, I’m so sorry,” she said inaudibly. Then louder, “Dr. Sayers,” she said. “Matthew . . .” She tried to keep her voice from cracking. “I beg you — please tell me what happened to my husband. Did Dimitri betray him? Was he arrested? We’re in Helsinki. We’re out of the Soviet Union. I’m not going back. I want so little for myself.” She bent her head into his arm. “I just want a little comfort,” she whispered.

“Go to . . . America, Tania.” His voice was fading. “That will be his comfort.”

“Comfort me with the truth. Did you really see him in the lake?”

The doctor stared at her for a long moment with an expression that looked to Tatiana to be one of understanding and disbelief, and then he closed his eyes. Tatiana felt his hand trembling in hers, heard his breath sputtering in his chest. Soon it stopped.

Tatiana didn’t let go of his hand until morning.



A nurse came in and gently led Tatiana away, and in the hall she put her arms around Tatiana and said, in English, “Honey, you can do your very best for people, and they still die. We’re at war. You can’t save everybody, you know.”

Sam Leavitt approached her in the hall on the way to his rounds, asking her what she intended to do. Tatiana said she needed to get back to America. Leavitt stared at her and said, “Back to America?” Leaning toward her, he said, “Listen, I don’t know where Matthew found you, your English is pretty good, but it’s not that good. Are you really an American?”

Paling, Tatiana nodded.

“Where is your passport? Can’t get back without a passport.”

She stared at him mutely.

“Besides, it’s too dangerous now. The Germans bomb the Baltic mercilessly.”

“Yes.”

“Ships go down all the time.”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you stay here till April, work until the ice melts? Your face has to heal. The stitches need to come out. And we could use another pair of hands. Stay in Helsinki.”

Tatiana shook her head.

“You’ll have to stay here anyway until we get you a new passport. Do you want me to take you to Senate Square later? I’ll take you to the U.S. consulate. It’ll take them at least a month to issue you new documents. By that time the ice will have melted. Getting to America is hard these days.”

Tatiana knew that the U.S. State Department, digging around to find a Jane Barrington, would discover only that she was not Jane Barrington. Alexander told her they could not stay a second in Helsinki — the NKVD had a long arm. Alexander said that they had to get to Stockholm. Shaking her head, Tatiana backed away from the doctor.

She left the hospital, carrying her backpack, her nurse’s bag, her Jane Barrington travel documents. She walked to the semicircular south harbor in Helsinki and sat on the bench, watching the vendors at Market Square pack up their carts and their tables and sweep the square clean.

Calm descended again.

The seagulls screeched overhead.

Tatiana sat on the bench and waited interminable hours until night fell, and then she got up and walked past a narrow street leading up to the gleaming Church of St. Nicholas. She barely glanced at it.

In the dark she meandered up and down the harbor until she spotted trucks with the blue-and-white Swedish flag, loading small amounts of lumber lying in piles on the ground. There was quite a bit of activity in the harbor. Tatiana could see that night was the time for the supplies to get across the Baltic. She knew that the trucks did not travel by day, when it was easy to spot them. Though the Germans generally did not bomb neutral trade vessels, sometimes they did. Sweden had finally started sending all its shipping and trucking trade with protective convoys. Alexander told her that.

Tatiana knew that the trucks were headed for Stockholm because one of the men said the word “Stokgolm,” which sounded like “Stockholm” in Russian.

She stood at the edge of the harbor watching the lumber being loaded onto the back of an open truck. Was she scared? No. Not anymore. She approached the truck driver, showing him her Red Cross badge, and said in English that she was a nurse trying to get to Stockholm and could he please take her across the Gulf of Bothnia with him for a hundred American dollars. He didn’t understand a word of what she had said. She showed him a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Stokgolm?” Gladly taking the money from her hands, he let her ride with him.

He didn’t speak any English or Russian, so they barely talked, which was fine with Tatiana. On the way through the white-out darkness, illuminated by the convoy’s headlights and by the gleaming northern lights above her head, she remembered that the first time she kissed Alexander when they were in the woods in Luga, she was really afraid that he was going to know immediately that she had never been kissed before, and she thought, if he asks me, I’m going to lie, because I don’t want him to think less of me. She thought that for the first second or two, and then she couldn’t think about anything, because his lips were so abundantly passionate for her, because in her hunger to kiss him back she had forgotten her inexperience.